Category Archives: Possible terror attack

Both the Islamic State and Al Qaeda have issued audio, video or online threats to attack the West this Christmas.

These threats focus on European population centers, such as Paris and London, and New York City in America, though the possibility of Jihadi attacks in other places in the West can certainly not be discounted. History has shown that places as diverse geographically as Brussels, Berlin and San Bernardino have all been targeted, especially at Christmas time.

Lone Wolf or Individual Jihad?

The possible attacks in the West could take the form of organized, planned attacks directed from Jihadi leaders overseas or inside Europe or America, or they could be carried out by individuals “inspired” by Jihadist ideology.

Ironically, very often, Western media and officials seem to take some form of weird comfort when a deadly attack ends up being the work of an individual jihadi, as opposed to an organized cell or affiliate of a known terrorist group.

In reality, the opposite should be the case.

First of all, none of the Jihadist groups–Islamic State, Al Qaeda, HAMAS, Hezbollah, the Taliban, Boko Haram, Al Shabaab, Lashkar e Taiba, Ansar al-Sharia, Abu Sayyef, Jemaah Islamiyeh–issue membership cards or wear uniforms. So a case can be made that classification of an attacker as “inspired” or “directed” could be a distinction without a difference.

But there is a difference between a cell such as the 19 hijackers who carried out the September 11 attacks after training and planning conducted by Al Qaeda’s leadership and infrastructure, and the husband and wife team who shot up a Christmas party of people they knew and worked with in San Bernardino. (Though it is vital that we understand that their acts are based on the same Islamic doctrine and they are tied together by the same Jihadist ideology.)

So which flavor of Jihadi is more dangerous?

If you’re on the receiving end of an attack, it makes no difference to you, but by casualty count, the cell would appear to pose a greater threat. On the other hand, the inspired attacks seem to happen much more frequently.

A case can be made that individual Jihadis pose a greater challenge for our intelligence and law enforcement communities.

Cells have to be organized, trained and communicated back and forth with. All of this provides opportunities for detection and even infiltration.

Individual jihadis don’t offer any of these potential vulnerabilities. One can infiltrate a cell, especially one in which members are using cell phones and email to contact each other and leaders elsewhere. How does one infiltrate one guy, like the Chattanooga, Tennessee shooter, the Orlando shooter or the Uzbeki vehicle jihad attacker in New York City?

If the individual jihadi isn’t communicating with others and no one is aware of his or her plans, how are our intelligence and law enforcement assets supposed to detect them “left of bang” (before the attack)?

Unfortunately, here in the West, and the U.S. in particular, we have failed to even properly identify the nature of the threat. A popular term in Western vernacular to describe the threat of individual jihad is the term “lone wolf.”

The term “lone wolf” does not appear in Islamic doctrine, nor is it part of any Jihadist group ideology.

What is part of Islamic doctrine and Jihadist ideology is the concept of Jihad as an individual obligation. So what we have been seeing around the world are acts of individual jihad based on Islamic doctrine and Jihadist ideology. Given the basis for these attacks, they are not “senseless violence.” We can explain and understand these attacks based upon Islamic doctrine and Jihadist ideology.

Most importantly, the wave of individual jihadi attacks in recent years is all part of plans articulated by Jihadi ideologues:

Successful jihad will only happen within an ummah [Islamic nation or community] in which the fighting creed is firmly established and clarified. This must happen in order to attain the “Revolutionary Jihadist Climate” that will spontaneously give rise to instruments of resistance.

Violent jihad is as an individual duty obligatory upon every Muslim. All the ulema have said this…”

We are now seeing this “Revolutionary Jihadist Climate” in the West as evidenced by the rise of seemingly spontaneous acts of Jihad carried out by individual Muslims with no known direct contacts with Jihadist organizations.

It is this threat that we are most likely to see this Christmas.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from your Local Jihadi

Warnings in Jihadist literature and on Jihadi social media aren’t meant to give us a heads up. They are meant to inspire individual Jihadis to rise up and attack, in this case during the Christmas season. If recent history is any indication, we will see an act of deadly jihad somewhere in the West as a result of these communications.

The Christmas and New Year season is a particularly high-risk period as it offers unusually large numbers of potentially high-value and high-casualty targets, not just in places like New York, London, Paris and Berlin, but in just about every major city in the West.

The holiday season brings large crowds at sporting events, Christmas celebrations and ceremonies, churches, parks, restaurants and other gathering locations. In addition, the holiday season is also characterized by high volumes of leisure travel leading to large numbers of travellers in airports and train depots. The vast number of potential targets makes it virtually impossible for homeland security and law enforcement agencies to deploy enough personnel to successfully prevent every possible attack.

The Western holiday season is particularly attractive to Islamic jihadists because any successful attack, even a minor one, becomes a propaganda victory that can inspire others to follow suit and aid in Jihadist organization recruitment (despite what the U.S. government has said, Jihadis don’t recruit based on the prison at Gitmo; they recruit based on their successful attacks).

Jihadists have repeatedly demonstrated their will and capacity to plan and execute attacks during high-profile events. The Nice (July 216), Berlin (December 2016) and Manchester (May 2017) attacks show how individual jihadis and small cells can successfully carry out mass-casualty attacks. Despite their resounding defeats in Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State continues to benefit from supporters in the West, which means there is a greater risk of terrorist attacks in the West during the holiday season.

We are most likely to see vehicle jihad using large trucks, knife jihad (stabbings) and shooting attacks, but improvised explosive device (IED) attacks are certainly also a possibility using pressure cookers (Boston marathon bombing), fertilizer and diesel fuel (1993 World Trade Center bombing) or propane tanks (failed Time Square VBIED attack).

This is why intelligence services and foreign service offices continue to issue bulletins almost on a daily basis for Europe. As Christmas nears, we should expect to see such alerts issued for major events in the U.S. as well.

This is a hugely important story which, naturally, is being ignored by the U.S. news media because it didn’t happen here…yet…or this time…or something…

An Imam at a mosque in southern Italy has been arrested for recruiting Somali refugees to launch terrorist attacks in Italy, including an attack at Rome’s central train station.

This is obviously important for two reasons:

1. It is another case of an Islamic religious cleric being involved in Jihadist terrorism, something that has happened frequently, but continues to be ignored by our bureaucratized counterterror apparatus and media.

2. The recruiting activity was being conducted among refugees seeking asylum in Italy.

On Wednesday, 4 November, Faisel Mohammad of Santa Clara, California went on a “stabbing spree” at the University of California at Merced in Sacramento. He stabbed 4 people before he was shot dead by police.

So far, press reports are littered with the usual “he was a quiet guy” garbage about Mohammad and the Sheriff of Merced County, Vern Warnke, who obviously knows zilch about Islamic doctrine and clearly hasn’t been paying much attention to Jihad in recent months, is insistent that this attack had nothing to do with “religion” or “politics,” but was the result of a personal vendetta because Mohammad was angry about being kicked out of a study group.

There are some facts that Sheriff Warnke is actively ignoring.

For example, the Islamic State issued a tweet acknowledging Mohammad’s attack and wishing that allah would allow him entrance into paradise. Last week this same Twitter account associated with the Islamic State posted tweets with videos calling for stabbing attacks.

We have now seen this over and over, the Islamic State, using both social media and internet bulletin boards and chat rooms, have made specific calls for acts of individual Jihad in the West and Jihadis are surfacing to carry out such attacks.

Stabbings have recently become the method of choice by Jihadis in Israel, with dozens of stabbings being carried out by Muslims. Does Sheriff Warnke even bother to watch the news?

In addition to this evidence, police have found a “manifesto” written by Mohammad and what does it contain?

• 5 references to praise for allah over two pages.

• A statement in which Mohammad said he wanted to behead someone. This is pure Jihadi doctrine, as anyone who has been paying attention the past several years knows.

The repeated denials by public officials in this country about the central role of Islamic doctrine in acts of violence are both irresponsible and obnoxious.

We are seeing the development of a “revolutionary Jihadist climate” as described by Jihadi ideologue Abu Musab al-Suri:

Successful jihad will only happen within an ummah [Islamic nation or community] in which the fighting creed is firmly established and clarified. This must happen in order to attain the “Revolutionary Jihadist Climate” that will spontaneously give rise to instruments of resistance.

Violent jihad is as an individual duty obligatory upon every Muslim. All the ulema have said this…”

Denying that individual acts of Jihad are exactly what they are is contributing to the slumber that this nation finds itself in and we will pay a dear price for it.

Like this:

There was a violent incident last night at the New Orleans Louis Armstrong International Airport involving a machete-wielding attacker carrying Molotov Cocktails in a bag charging a security screening checkpoint and wounding a TSA agent.

It is not at all clear that this was a Jihadi attack, but it cannot be ruled out at this point.

We’ve attached a PDF of the New Orleans airport perp’s Facebook page. Plenty of fruitcake stuff on there. But the claim to be from Saudi Arabia is right there on the left.

Relatives claim he has been having mental problems.

It may in fact be mental illness and nothing more, but we have also seen cases in which someone converts to Islam, starts talking about Islam a lot to friends and family and dressing like a Muslim, etc–and the family claims that the person has “gone nuts.” An example would be Carlos Bledsoe, who converted to Islam, acted very strangely according to his father and eventually murdered US Army Private Andy Long in Little Rock.

It is also common for new converts to be especially ardent and pious. That is what happened with the guy in Oklahoma City who beheaded the woman at his former workplace. He had converted to Islam recently, started proselytizing to the point at which he got fired and, when the lady got into a conflict with him on the subject, he beheaded her.

As soon as we heard that there was a beheading involved, we knew immediately it was an act of individual jihad. The Quran and the Hadith are both replete with references to “smiting” enemies “at their necks.”

We’re not big fans of Congressman Mike Rogers. We think he was involved in a cover-up of a covert operation associated with the Benghazi terrorist attack.

But we have to grudgingly agree with his assessment in this case:

The threat of a terrorist attack against the United States is at the highest level it has been in a decade, outgoing House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers said Friday.

“The threat matrix I have never seen as bad as I see it today,” Rogers said at a newsmaker breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. “You have more streams of individuals who are associated with radical Islam who are saying they have either an aspiration or a capability to do attacks in the West, meaning Europe or the United States.”

The Michigan Republican, who has served on the Intelligence panel for the past 10 years, said the Obama administration and isolationists within the Republican Party are so anxious to disengage from the conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan that they are allowing the Islamic State to gain strength and recruits.

At a news conference at a hospital where one officer was being treated for a serious head wound, Police Commissioner William Bratton said that investigators were still trying to confirm the identity of the assailant and determine a motive.

Asked if the attack could be related to terrorism, Bratton didn’t rule it out.

In this day and age when officials are almost always quick to rule out terrorism before they have any justification for ruling anything out, this statement almost amounts to a smoking gun…

Thursday evening the New York Police Department issued a patrol bulletin alerting officers to be in a state of heightened awareness after Wednesday’s murder of a Canadian soldier and shootout at the Parliament complex in Ottawa. The bulletin warns of potential attacks on uniformed officers.

Police from the Intelligence Division are checking the suspect’s hard drives for any cyber activity.

Like this:

Jihad is inherently expansionist and aggressive. Apologists in the West who try to sell the bill of goods like “the Taliban are only interested in Afghanistan,” or “HAMAS only wants ‘their’ land…or Al Shabaab is only targeting Somalia, simply have no idea what they’re talking about.

Al Shabaab, for instance, has targeted Kenya and Uganda in the past and now they are evidently targeting Ethiopia:

Somali Islamist insurgents are plotting to attack an upmarket area of Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa, the US embassy has warned, in a notice to citizens to avoid crowded areas.

The exact target is not known but the embassy said the “potential imminent terrorist attack” threatened the busy Bole district, which includes the capital’s international airport and several diplomatic missions. “The embassy has received threat reports of Al Shabaab’s intent to target the Bole area,” said the notice to citizens released Tuesday.

“Restaurants, hotels, bars, places of worship, supermarkets, and shopping malls in the Bole area should be avoided until further notice, because they are possible targets.”

Anyone who doesn’t realize that Hezbollah is a Jihadist organization with global reach hasn’t been paying attention.

There are too many Americans in particular who have come to view Hezbollah as strictly an organization limited to operations in Lebanon.

That just isn’t true. In fact, there can be no doubt that Hezbollah has operatives here in America, perhaps many of them. And we know that Hezbollah has supporters, including financial supporters, here in the USA.

But the latest story involving a Jihadist plot by Hezbollah comes from Thailand, a popular tourist destination for Israelis and other Westerners–and a country that is contending with an Jihadist insurgency of its own.

Thai authorities arrested two Hezbollah members who evidently confessed to a bomb plot targeting Israeli tourists.

The two Jihadis were identified as Daoud Farhat, a French-Lebanese national, and Youssef Ayad, who is of Lebanese-Filipino extraction.

Farhat held a French passport and Ayad carried a Philippines passport. Their passports indicated that both were born in Lebanon, but it is not yet certain that the passports are genuine.

Farhat was in Thailand for the first time, but Ayad has visited Thailand 17 times.

Thai investigators believe at least nine suspected foreign terrorists connected to Hezbollah are somewhere in Thailand and that one other possible co-conspirator may have already fled Thailand. One of the other suspects is said to be named Bilal Bahsoun.